The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 2002 by Spilogale

Author:Spilogale [Spilogale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction/Fantasy
Publisher: www.Fictionwise.com
Published: 2001-10-20T22:00:00+00:00

Films

LUCIUS SHEPARD

THE GHOST AND MS. KIDMAN

Some years back I was approached by a TV producer who offered to pay me what then seemed decent money to come up with some story ideas for a hit cop series. He said they were tired of doing stories centering on coke dealers and wanted to take the show in a new direction. I spent a couple of afternoons working up a number of non-drug-oriented plots, all of which the man said he loved. He paid me and gushed about how eager he was to get the ideas into script. Then he went out and shot twenty-two shows about coke dealers for the new season.

Akin to this is the Hollywood tradition of bringing in foreign directors to create a fresh look for an old idea or a sequel. What generally happens in this circumstance is that the director is hamstrung with a horrible script, valiantly tries to give the project a fresh take, and is thwarted at every turn by the producers who hired him. Their attitude, you see, has changed. They now are concerned that this interloper will screw up their cash cow and often once the film has been finished, the producers—most of whom are blessed with the creative sensibilities of a rutabaga—will re-edit the picture themselves, confident that their commercial genuis will compensate for a lack of talent and craftsmanship. Recent Hollywood history is strewn with mutant horrors engendered by such unholy unions. For instance, Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors) went over the regrettable Mulholland Falls; Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen) got screen credit but should not be blamed for the franchise-killing Alien 4; Jocelyn Moorhouse (Proof) wound up muffled by How to Make an American Quilt; P. J. Hogan went from the vitality of Muriel's Wedding to the malaise of My Best Friend's Wedding; Bruno Barreto (Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands) was defeated by One Tough Cop starring Stephen Baldwin; John Woo, Ringo Lam, and Tsui Hark, the creator of Chinese Ghost Story, were all saddled with awful pictures featuring the Muscles from Brussels, Jean Claude Van Damme.... To avoid adding their names to what has become a long and woeful list, some European directors who want to achieve an American success have begun staying at home and shooting their movies in English, hoping that this way they will preserve their artistic integrity. But there is a further pitfall they fail to take into account—distributors frequently elect to recut foreign films themselves, sometimes for no other reason than the film is a bit long for their tastes, and they have been known on occasion to make their cuts by simply removing a reel. According to reliable sources, it is into this pit that Alejandro Amenabar's The Others appears to have fallen.

Ghost stories have had a minor cinematic renaissance in the United States since the runaway success of The Sixth Sense, and probably will continue to do so because of the subsequent good box office performance of Robert Zemeckis's What Lies Beneath,

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